Qatar on the Playing Field of International Politics

Qatar is basking in the global spotlight as the host of the 2022 World Cup. Less prominently, it is the latest country to introduce an asylum law. Qatar’s new-found status as a global host, of football and of asylum seekers, serves to showcase the country, and boost its global reputation.

FIFA’s choice of Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup in October 2010 sent shockwaves across sports and politics. It was particularly surprising given that Doha’s bid was generally viewed as the weakest of all the candidate states. Football has become a wildly popular sport in many other Arab nations. Matches in the Qatar Stars League, however, typically attract only a few hundred spectators.

In 2018, Qatar adopted a national asylum framework. It was a move that attracted far less attention than its winning World Cup bid. Yet introducing an asylum law was equally surprising given Doha’s almost complete lack of prior interest in refugee protection. Nevertheless, international NGOs praised Doha’s apparent commitment to becoming a safe haven for people fleeing persecution.

Hosting the world’s biggest sporting tournament and hosting people seeking protection appear to be two fundamentally different things. However, we can view both as attempts to convince the world of Qatar’s attractiveness and to enhance its global standing. In treating asylum as a political football on the field of international politics, Qatar follows a well-worn path.

Qatar’s Unlikely Asylum Law

Political scientists call the ability of one country to influence other states without military or economic superiority ‘soft power‘. States applying soft power aim to improve their international influence and standing by persuading other states of their political and cultural capacities. Argentina’s hosting of the 1978 World Cup under military dictatorship, and India’s worldwide promotion of Yoga, are two clear examples.

When Qatar became the first Gulf state to enact an asylum law in 2018, it did so amid a diplomatic crisis. One year earlier, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt had cut diplomatic and economic relations with their Gulf neighbor. The Arab Quartet publicly accused Doha of supporting terrorism, and petitioned FIFA to revoke Qatar as the 2022 World Cup host.

Against this backdrop, introducing an asylum law reflected Doha’s aspiration to improve its public perception and overcome international isolation. By announcing it would provide protection to people fleeing persecution, Doha burnished its humanitarian credentials before the international community. It also signaled to the world that Qatar is a safe, modern state in a sea of strife and conflict.

Welcoming Refugees to Signal Virtue

The simultaneous deployment of asylum as an instrument of humanitarian protection and to signal national honor is hardly new. During the Cold War, Western governments often gave a warm welcome to people fleeing the Iron Curtain. Welcoming refugees was seen as a sign of the superiority of the democratic capitalist West over the totalitarian communist East.

In turn, countries east of the Iron Curtain celebrated the arrival of artists and scientists leaving the capitalist West. Communist states welcomed these arrivals as proof that Western states were failing and that their citizens were tiring of the capitalist rat race.

However, the end of the global superpower contest brought about by the fall of the Iron Curtain meant that welcoming people from the other side no longer signaled moral and ideological superiority. Indeed, asylum seekers were rapidly recast as an economic burden and a cultural threat. Consequently, the collapse of communism was one reason behind the rise of policies of deterrence and containment, and the increasing adoption of physical and procedural barriers to asylum.

Asylum as a Political Football

FIFA president Gianni Infantino has praised the 2022 World Cup as the ‘best in history.‘ However, Qatar’s host status has been highly controversial because the country stands accused of abusing basic human rights. Moreover, the event has gained notoriety for lackluster energy in the stadiums and the apparent ambivalence of host-country spectators. For example, when Qatar went 2-0 down in the first half against Ecuador, many Qataris simply left the stadium.

Qatar showed similar ambivalence towards people seeking asylum in the country. Despite having adopted an asylum law, the Gulf state has been reluctant to establish the necessary structure to process asylum applications. This became abundantly clear when human rights organizations learned Qatar had threatened to expel a Yemeni national without bothering to consider his asylum claim.

Internationally, Qatar has been more generous. This year it launched the initiative FIFA Qatar 2022 for All: Sharing the Joy of Refugees and Displaced Persons, giving people in refugee camps across Africa and Asia the opportunity to watch World Cup matches on big screens. But just as other countries treated their asylum laws as signals of virtue and used refugees as political footballs, it seems that Qatar’s national asylum framework is only for show.

This blog post was adapted from « the Loop » article published on December 16, 2022. All rights reserved.

Frowin Rausis is a doctoral student and researcher at the University of Lucerne associated with the nccr – on the move in the project “The Mobility of Migration Policies: Pathways and Consequences of the Diffusion of Migration Policies.”